Museum of The Book

Do dead men really tell no tales? Believe it if you want to but I can definitely hear the echo of a choir singing their last song 453 years after they died. Every conflict, every disagreement and every struggle, however large or small, has two sides to the story. Yet there are occasions when the silence of one of the parties involved is so deafening that the bystander to history is obliged to enquire further. Not to do so is to invite history to 

repeat itself and the next time we just might be the victims. 

 

The background to our enquiry is religious in nature, though as is often the case, “the love of money is the root of all evil.” How many wars have been fought, how many lives have been sacrificed, how many lies have been told in the name of Christianity or one particular view of Christianity? Nor should we forget the same is true of every other religion and secular/atheistic belief system because their proponents have coveted someone else’s land, money and power. If the truth of many past atrocities were only known I’m sure history books would have to be rewritten. In fact, the precise truth of history is known and recorded in the annals of Heaven and someday all will give an account.

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The year was 1562 when a contingent of French Huguenots (Protestants)  established a settlement with the promise of being able to worship God without fear of persecution from the French Catholic Church. This promise, made by the Catholic French government, was a way of ridding itself of some of those nasty  heretical  Protestants and  at the same time a way of gaining control over some new territory. The religious band of migrating pilgrims, however, were not so much concerned with the French government’s territorial aspirations as they were with living in peace and worshiping God in freedom according to the dictates of the Bible. They built their houses and shops and a fortification, called Fort Caroline [in honour of the French Queen], at the mouth of a grand river, in an uncharted land occupied by primitive, howbeit, religious natives. Continued...